Table of contents for July - August 2015 in Huck

At 8am on a chilly November morning, Aaron Vincent Elkaim found himself alone on a road in Northern Alberta’s Boreal forest. He’d barely spoken to another person for two weeks, and the heaviness of that fact started to weigh him down as he walked towards his car. The softness of the morning light was drifting into a harsher glow so he decided to call time on today’s hunt. These walks he took, camera in hand, were becoming a pre-dawn routine. And yet he still couldn’t find a way into Fort McKay – a way to unpick the First Nation community that had drawn him here and the story unfolding around them. But as he pulled out onto the vacant road, an entry point came hurtling towards him. “I had this…

Dee Ripoll has come full circle. After studying for seven years to become a lawyer, she gave up everything to dedicate herself to surfing. Chasing waves became her world. Now, at twenty-nine, she’s found her way to a more balanced place. But getting here wasn’t easy. Growing up in Scotland, Dee picked up her first surfboard in her last year at university. Within three years, she had earned the title of Scottish Ladies Surfing Champion. But in the summer of 2013, while surfing in France, Dee had to face an unexpected challenge when she found herself, one early morning, in the wrong place at the wrong time. “As soon as I hit the water it was like landing on concrete,” Dee recalls. She had gotten up with the sun to…

The first thing was rap, rap, rap,” explains Rodney Smith on the genesis of his new album. “Just rap to everything and anything. Rap to a recording of Nice & Smooth, rap to a ringtone, record a whole song just through an old dictaphone, recording stuff through headphones, actually recording total gibberish. Endless takes of freestyle.” Smith might just be UK hip hop’s brightest son. Since his first release as Roots Manuva, in 1995, the Brixton rapper has helped take the genre beyond a US import, innovating and collaborating with artists as diverse as The Cinematic Orchestra, Beth Orton and the Gorillaz, to show homegrown talent can carve its own path. His 1999 masterpiece Brand New Second Hand took on meaty political and moral themes with the authority of a…

Adventure is such a broad term,” muses surfer and artist Jay Nelson. “It could be going to Disneyland or it could be hiking Mount Everest. To me, it’s lost its meaning. It doesn’t really have any real significance to me anymore.” While many people look to photographs, or scars, to mark the passage of time in their lives, Jay has the objects he’s built. The treehouses, scooters, boats. The evolving studio growing out from the rear of his house. And most of all the beloved campers that have taken him on meaningful journeys around the world. Together, these handmade ‘things’ have all helped bridge important chapters in his life. Jay’s first-ever build as a teenager was a make-it-up-as-you-go-along treehouse. But over the years he’s refined his craft, designing and building…

Casper Brooker is dusty because he’s been pumping around a dirt track on a skateboard with soft wheels in a city farm in East London. It’s Go Skateboarding Day 2015 and Nike SB have pulled out all the stops to organise a memorable outing. Hundreds of dusty skaters are falling over each other to complete the run and after a couple of goes the swarm assemble and push off to Victoria Park for the next lols – pizza and bowl trolls. Other London-based culprits are out in force – Neil ‘Smithy’ Smith, Chris Jones, Tom Tanner – and it looks like any other weekend in the city, but Casper hasn’t spent a whole lot of time in London recently. The Nike SB skateboarder, originally from Croydon, has been living out…

Wellington likes to think that it’s full of artists,” says Mike Duffy, founder of Ekim Burgers. “But it’s also full of bureaucratic cocks. Wellington City Council – and I’m going to shoot myself in the foot here – is really fucking useless at getting anything done, unless someone’s already done it.” Ekim currently operates out of a bus on an old car park on Cuba Street. Mike had originally planned to use shipping containers, but the battle to get permission cost him nearly NZ$12,000. “I ended up getting a bus, because it’s got wheels, so it’s definitely not a building,” says Mike. “Otherwise you would’ve got some rich guy buying up the car yard.” Mike originally worked out of an orange caravan in Lyall Bay. “It’s by the airport so…

Fourteen years ago Pat Shepherd flew halfway around the world in search of snow. Originally from Aberdeen, Scotland, he ended up doing three seasons in Wanaka, on the South Island. The good skiing, relaxed lifestyle and culture of pitching in suited him. “There were a lot of top skiers around the place when I was there,” he says. “And they, like me, were all sleeping on my friend’s floors.” Pat looked for extra work to complement his snow days and started taking photos of local bands. But Wanaka is a tiny place, and he soon ran out of muses. After a research trip to Wellington, where he photographed more musicians in ten days than he had in three seasons, he upped sticks and moved north. He immersed himself in the…

Adventure comes in many guises. While for some it’s about chasing the limits of human endurance, for most of us it’s about stepping into the unknown; casting adrift from the invisible safety net that surrounds our everyday existence. And it’s this feeling of risk, of taking a chance to create something better, that pushed Philadelphia noise-gaze quartet Creepoid beyond the abyss. The tight-knit unit (Patrick Troxell, his wife Anna – “we met through Philadelphia’s hardcore scene” – Sean Miller and Nick Miller) are enjoying a rare moment of downtime in between their seemingly endless travels. When we meet at The Great Escape festival in Brighton, they’re in the kind of delirious state that only comes with a lengthy stint on the road. “We played the Texas Psych Fest, got in…

You know when you’re a kid and you want to go exploring and your mum doesn’t let you out into the street, but says you can go explore the garden instead? And you either stick your bottom lip out, sulk and go watch TV because the garden sucks or you actually go out there, use your imagination and have an amazing time? When we grow up, our home cities are the boring garden – we have to fly to Laos to have an exciting time and discover new things, but as we can’t afford it we plug into Netflix. Tom Carroll is that other kid, though. He looked at his native Los Angeles, saw there were literally thousands of adventures he could have, and he set up the YouTube channel…

BIKE TOURING ISN’T JUST about what bike you ride, or how many kilometres you average each day. It’s about slowing down, absorbing the landscape instead of speeding by, and connecting with the people you pass. As a photographer, it’s the ultimate adventure, a chance to see things I’d never normally spot and stop whenever I please. Add to that freedom the unique joys of riding solo and you open yourself up to unexpected twists that travelling by car or with a group simply don't allow for. Highway 1 down the West Coast of the United States, from Vancouver to San Diego, is a hugely popular route for the cycling obsessed. And it’s not hard to see why. The epic scenery – from rugged mountains and huge Redwoods in the north,…

You can never feel safe when you’re bombing the streets, says photographer Valerio Polici. And, having grown up as a graffiti writer in Rome, Polici should know. You’re always looking over your shoulder, he says, even during the day when you’re not tagging. Graffiti and the lifestyle that comes with it – being on the run from authorities, living on your nerve, and forging lasting bonds with other writers – becomes all consuming, he adds, and it is the lure of danger, the illegality of it all, that pulls people in and keeps them coming back for more. Polici, who was born on the outskirts of Rome, started doing graffiti at the age of thirteen. He and his cousin, who lived in the same apartment building in an “ugly suburban…

Wellington’s pretty much over for us now,” says Joe ‘Hopepa’ Lindsay through a yawn. The trombonist from Fat Freddy’s Drop is staying on a friend’s sofa in Auckland and I’ve just woken him up. “We’ve been around for years, we’re not hip young things on the block anymore. We threw a gig recently and all our mates turned up, which was nice, but it was pretty hard because they all just stood there talking to each other. We were like, ‘Hey, guys! We’re still here!’ But we’re old hat now.” Despite Joe’s fears, Fat Freddy’s Drop are still one of Wellington’s most recognisable bands. Their sound – a boiling stew of deep dub, delta blues and funk, elevated with intricate jazz licks and tight electronica – has soundtracked summer festival…

The ground beneath Matt Moniz’s feet had been shaking for fifteen seconds before the avalanche broke through the low cloud. The wall of snow came towards Everest Base Camp at 200 miles per hour, leaving him and his climbing group just enough time to scramble behind a rock, roughly two feet high. But that was just the first problem. When that much snow comes down at that speed, it drags the remaining oxygen from the already thin air with it. So when Moniz lifted his head to see the devastated new landscape around him, he couldn’t breathe. “We were all in a state of shock,” he says. “My adrenaline was going so hard that I couldn’t pay attention to anything… I thought to myself, ‘There’s nowhere to run to. This…

I’m not interested at all in fashion. I’m one hundred per cent interested in stories.” Nigel Cabourn is sitting in the slantlit garden room of his home in the quiet Newcastle suburb of Gosforth, where he has lived and run his eponymous fashion label for the last couple of decades. The house is all dark, local stone. There’s a well-kept lawn and shrubbery, a quiver of cars on the shingle. The garden room looks out onto the whitewashed gables of South Northumberland Cricket Club; a quintessentially English scene, though the sound of leather on willow is absent this Thursday morning. It’s from here – physically and figuratively a million miles away from anything that resembles the transience of ‘the fashion world’ – that Nigel Cabourn produces the most authentic, rugged…

HEIKKI RUUSUNEN IS SEARCHING through a compost heap. He picks up fat snails and places them in his bucket, ready to be taken to Jouni Toivanen, a Michelin chef. It’s top chefs like Jouni that have triggered the wild food trend, going after denser, locally sourced flavours. And Heikki, a professional hunter-gatherer who forages for a living, is supplying what they demand. We’re in Helsinki, Finland’s largest city. Just a stone’s throw from the centre, there are garden allotments by the glistening sea. In the background, a picturesque neighbourhood of wooden houses rises steeply on a hill. Narrow paths run by the water, some of them disappearing to lush woods. “Someone’s trash is another one’s treasure,” says Heikki, inspecting the roots of dandelion he just found. The plant that most…

‘‘TO BE AWAY FROM HOME, YET TO FEEL ONESELF EVERYWHERE AT HOME; TO SEE THE WORLD, TO BE AT THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD, YET TO REMAIN HIDDEN FROM THE WORLD – SUCH ARE A FEW OF THE SLIGHTEST PLEASURES OF THOSE INDEPENDENT, PASSIONATE, IMPARTIAL NATURES WHICH THE TONGUE CAN BUT CLUMSILY DEFINE.’’ ~ CHARLES BAUDELAIRE take four bones: a femur, patella, tibia and fibula. Wrap in muscle, bind with tendons. Repeat. A pair of legs. An ingenious device for human transportation, yet we hardly ever walk these days. Instead, we travel in metal boxes and tubes, disconnected from the environments through which we are passing. Walking, by virtue of its very slowness, has become a radical act; an expression of individual freedom in a system designed for speedy travel,…

I’m on another page, in fact I’m in another book,” says Jalal Mansur Nuriddin. “I don’t let anything stifle my growth as an artist individually. I can work collectively, but I can take the ball to the basket myself without having to wait for anybody to pass it to me.” Nuriddin is sitting in the Institute for Contemporary Art, a stone’s throw from the heart of the monarchy in London. We’re here for a screening of Hustler’s Convention, a documentary about the legacy of his 1973 solo album of the same name, pseudonymously released under the moniker of Lightnin’ Rod. It’s the record that catalysed a movement and served as a blueprint, passed down in copies and cuts through hip hop’s luminaries like a sacred heirloom. Chuck D describes it…

FOREWARNING FROM INNKEEPER Larry Garretson: “There are very few restaurants in Pocahontas County and they all close by 6pm, so make sure you eat tonight before entering the Quiet Zone.” I opt for a graffiti-strewn wooden booth at High’s diner in Monterey, Virginia. And while I wait for my early-bird burger and fries, I scroll through my iPhone and re-check my route; through the valleys of the Allegheny Mountains, over the stateline and deep into a secluded pocket of West Virginia. Thank the Lord, as they say, for Google Maps. On the densely forested Highway 250, the frontier spirit of the American Civil War springs to life. Pocahontas County, rooted as it is in family values and the wishes of God, once provided shelter for First Nation folk who had…